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Among the A.I. doomsayers

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Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#271

Post by ecoquant »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #102

Always all-or-nothing thinking from these folks. Like what they are working on can never be just another boring thing that nerds find entertaining. No, it has to be "world-changing". Gonna "change the world" (for the better or the worse?) while sitting behind a keyboard. Except they do not know how to write. Overlook the important details and exaggerate, communicating in hyperbolic, know-it-all nerd gibberish. (Grant…

IMO we underestimate the psychological implications of wealth in modern society.

I suspect even if a power ball lottery winner takes a philosophical position it would be taken far more seriously than if they had never won the lottery.

At some point you start to believe your own bullshit when all of society signals are telling you what a genius you are.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#272

Post by Clubber »

preommr wrote: post #143
sberens wrote: post #131

I'd like to remind people of this single-sentence statement: > Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. [0] Signed by Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, and Bill Gates among others [0] https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk

I am 90% sure that Altman's views on such issues are a machiavelian attempt at regulatory capture.

This; Gates too. It's becoming an obvious attempt to garner support of the government restricting the use of AI to large players. None of the entrenched interests want any disruption that AI might cause what so ever.

Replace "AI" in all the doomsaying with "the internet," and it will become clearer.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#273

Post by darkest_ruby »

cyrialize wrote: post #266
matteoraso wrote: post #31

I've always wondered why people think that an AI that's super-intelligent will also be evil. It could just as likely end up being very kind (more than likely, actually, because the programmers would have safeguard to ensure that it's nice).

I like to fantasize about a super AI that does something for the working class people of the world. Like, imagine one day that an AI just took money from a ton of different corporations and billionaires and redistributed it amongst everyone else. People will argue against the AI, and it'll just respond back with research done on how UBI improved people's mental health and well being. One can dream!

AI is meant to be clever, AI will not do such stupid thing. Free money given to people who just spend it on unnecessary stuff will only cause more inflation. and the money will return the big corp anyway, just like it did during pandemic helicopter money times.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#274

Post by ninetyninenine »

ben_w wrote: post #243
nucleardog wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see the flaw in this, right? The people that try the models and find no value will obviously not continue to use something they get no value from. If you discount anyone that doesn’t use it on a continual basis, then of course all the detractors aren’t as heavy of users as those that do use it regularly.

Indeed, reminds me of the "beginner's luck" fallacy: all long term gamblers remember winning their first few games. We can't use this to our advantage, because the people who didn't win, didn't become long term gamblers. I think a better argument would be the size of the set of regular users vs. some grounded guesstimate for how many have tried it.

Or the losers fallacy. Seems like entrepreneurship is a good example of the losers fallacy. The path to winning is through losing a lot first. So most people never persist long enough to succeed.

I would say for AI deniers it's the losers fallacy. You guys haven't taken the time to thoroughly examine chatGPT4. You just stop at the first hallucination. It's a paradigm shifting AI.

Detractors like you just rely on common tropes like oh "stop anthropomorphizing it" and stuff like that. People who see this stuff as game changing recognize these biases and we still say it's game changing. Nobody is stupid enough to think this thing is even remotely human.

I asked chatGPT to program me a complex GUI in Python about selecting multiple time segments out of an overall interval using sliders. It gave me working python code.

You have realize that this thing has no eyes and it was able to program a visual interface as if it did. I'm not anthropomorphizing anything when I say this, but on some level chatGPT "understands" what you are giving it as a query.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#275

Post by PheonixPharts »

arisAlexis wrote: post #228
living_room_pc wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the AI hype train. There is so much money flowing around this topic right now, everyone wants their share of the pie. I would guess that anyone writing articles on the topic has some stake in AI as well either as an investor or a employee. What I find is interesting, is that the negative news regarding AI safety is adding to the hype as well since it seems to capture a lot of attention.

If you are calling it a hype I'm sure you are not using the models everyday in your work or otherwise. Then you would understand

I use these models every day, and have for quite awhile. More specifically the vast majority of my work on them has been evaluating their performance.

While there is certainly untapped potential with this models, what we've seeing is unquestionably market driven hype.

I know very, very few people who are working closely with these models who buy the hype.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#276

Post by 13years »

barfbagginus wrote: post #249
13years wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially there are no good outcomes even if AGI remains under control. If we are actually able to create the type of AI entity they are trying to create, one that exponentially improves, the implications are beyond what most have thought about. Something I recently wrote in depth about here. How we completely misunderstand the future that we think will happen. "The implication is that everyone is enthusiastically…

[flagged]

We don't know the end result of acceleration. Is it Dyson Spheres, virtual environments or Fermi Paradox.

The capitalist interpretation is just your nuance of observation. It is about finding meaning. Humanity struggles with meaning without purpose and finds it difficult to find purpose without struggle.

That is not my unique perspective. For a great allegory, I would recommend watching the Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place to Visit". It is precisely the vision of what endless acceleration might manifest and how some might perceive that type of existence.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#277

Post by xamuel »

ben_w wrote: post #250
i5heu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did not build a AGI yet so they have build as many AGIs as anyone else and therefore they are also laypersons regarding the effects of AGI on humanity.

The hour before Thomas Newcomen invented the first practical fuel-burning engine in 1712, the most informed person in the world to do so was an ironmonger by the name Thomas Newcomen. The hour before the Kitty Hawk flight, the two most informed people in the world on the topic of heavier than air flight were a pair of bicycle retailers and manufacturers named Wilbur and Orville. These people sure don't spot everythin…

>The hour before the Kitty Hawk flight, the two most informed people in the world on the topic of heavier than air flight were a pair of bicycle retailers and manufacturers named Wilbur and Orville.

Actually, this is quite false. There were many people working on flight with massive credentials and massive funding. That the Wright brothers beat them is part of what makes the story of the Wright brothers so interesting.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#278

Post by 13years »

tivert wrote: post #156
13years wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially there are no good outcomes even if AGI remains under control. If we are actually able to create the type of AI entity they are trying to create, one that exponentially improves, the implications are beyond what most have thought about. Something I recently wrote in depth about here. How we completely misunderstand the future that we think will happen. "The implication is that everyone is enthusiastically…

> https://www.mindprison.cc/p/the-technological-acceleration-p... That is a very good and insightful article. One of the biggest issues I have with AI enthusiasts is that they talk about creating these incredible capabilities ... then they imagine the resulting world with them will look like some hackneyed sci-fi work, like Star Wars, whose universe seems like it could be kinda cool to live in until you actually thin…

>That is a very good and insightful article.

Thank you!

> The only issue with the article is sometimes it's too optimistic, e.g.

The reply below is criticizing for being too pessimistic, lol :-)

I agree, it might be only a transient state. We really can't comprehend how we would deal with such existence if at all. Would we manage to keep our sanity?

Nonetheless, I don't claim to have the right answers, just questions and perspectives that I hope inspire deeper thought about the journey we are travelling and hopefully deeper reflection as to whether it is the journey we want to be on.

What I do find interesting, are those that read it and still don't perceive it at all. Their response is "That is exactly what I want." I suppose that is the case as was in an excellent allegory for this "A Nice Place to Visit" Twilight Zone episode. It plays out this scenario very nicely.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#279

Post by datadrivenangel »

namaria wrote: post #270
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would it become this?

Because, as unlikely as it is, if we're discussing risk scenarios for AI getting out of hand. Well then a monolithic superintelligence is just one of the possibilities. What about a swarm of dumb AIs that are nonetheless capable of reasoning and decision making and they become a threat? That's pretty much what we did. There's no super intelligent monkey in charge. As much as some have tried to pretend, material or ot…

Hey some of us are below average.

But yes, the corporations and swarm behavior are already doing poorly for our biosphere.

Re: Among the A.I. doomsayers

#280

Post by m3kw9 »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #231
m3kw9 wrote: post #40

Beware if someone assigns a p(doom). There is zero chance they know and 100% it came out of their backside. The only plausible p doom is a range of >0 and They really need to listen to themselves when they say there is a 50% chance we all die from AI

When dealing with black swan events, prediction is always difficult. However, some scenarios can be thought to be more plausible than others. I always interpret these as relative figures of plausibility for comparison rather than actual probabilities.

And how does that help anything other than to forward their agenda by making a high p(doom) that was pulled straight from their wazoo
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